“Jade!”
He sprinted toward the light, and as he came around the bend, he saw a woman standing there. It was not Jade, and she was not alone.
The woman was very attractive, with pale skin and raven black hair, and an almost palpable air of haughtiness. Curiously, despite the fact that the light from the portable electric lamp on the floor behind her could hardly be considered brilliant, she wore dark wraparound sunglasses.
Professor only gave her a passing glance. His attention was on the two men standing to either side of her. He recognized both of them. One was Jordan Kellogg, the man who had introduced himself as the assistant editor of Chameleon International publishing house.
The other man’s face was as familiar to Professor as his own. In fact, it was his own. He wore Professor’s clothes, even had his Omega Seamaster wristwatch and his Explorer fedora.
The two men — the two Changelings — had pistols leveled at him.
“I assume you are armed,” Kellogg said. “Let me assure you, it makes no difference to us whether you live or die, but if it matters to you, I suggest you place your weapon on the ground. Slowly.”
Professor raised his hands. Two-to-one odds were manageable, and he wasn’t afraid to get a little scuffed up, but there was a far more compelling reason for him to stand down. “Do you have Jade? Is she all right?”
Kellogg glanced at Professor’s doppleganger. “I told you she’d figure out how to get in.”
“Fat lot of good it did her,” the other man replied in Professor’s voice. “She got washed down into the waterworks. We’ll probably never find her body.”
While Professor did not grasp the context of the exchange, the implication was easily enough understood. The Changelings did not have Jade.
Which meant there was no reason to continue the conversation.
“What about Jade?” he said again. “Do you know where she is?”
He asked the question only to distract the two men. It was physically impossible to pull a trigger while talking, which meant that as soon as one of the men started to answer, he would draw his own weapon and start firing.
Before either Changeling could speak however, Shah stepped forward. “Gabrielle?”
The woman cocked her head in the direction of his voice. “Atash. I’m pleased that you’re here. I had hoped that you would find your way, though we had expected you to pursue Jade Ihara, not join her. I’m very impressed.”
Shah ignored the praise. “So it’s true. You have been working for…them…all along.”
“I am not working for anyone,” she replied calmly. “They are my family.”
“You used me!” Shah fairly screamed the accusation, stomping forward, heedless of the weapons pointed at him.
Professor caught Shah’s biceps to stop his advance. “Get a grip,” he said, speaking almost as loud as Shah had. “They’ve got guns. You’ll just get yourself killed.”
The woman’s head tilted back and forth, bird-like, confirming what Professor had suspected from the moment he saw her sunglasses. She was blind. That fact seemed a lot less important than the matter of her prior relationship with Shah. He addressed the woman. “Gabrielle is it? What am I saying? That name is probably as fake as everything else about you. I take it you’re the partner he’s been talking about. The one who convinced him to go after Jade?”
The woman inclined her head in what might have been a nod.
“That was a real boneheaded thing to do,” Professor went on. “Especially if you already had somebody on the inside.”
“You’re a military man,” Kellogg said. “You know how lines of communication can sometimes get crossed.”
“You could have gotten yourself killed Kellogg or whatever your real name is.” He took a deep breath, surreptitiously lowering his hands an inch or two. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You three — and all the rest of the Changelings back at the nest — have known about this place…”
He gestured expansively. “This Vault, all along. You’re the self-appointed protectors, making sure that nobody else finds it, right? If someone gets too close, you kill them. Or…” He nodded to Shah. “Trick someone else into doing the dirty work for you. Roche got too close to the truth, so you had to off him. And hey, while you’re at it, set the Muslims up to be the bad guys. Hell, push the right buttons and they’ll line up to deal some jihad on the infidels who insult the Prophet.”
He sensed a subtle shift in Shah’s ire — away from the blind woman and toward him — which given the circumstances wasn’t such a bad thing. If Shah didn’t take it down a notch, he might get them both killed.
“So what it is, exactly? What’s the big deal about this Vault? What’s so important that you murder people and disappear a whole plane full of people?”
The woman — Gabrielle — smiled. “It’s not for you.”
The words sent a chill through him. “Eve said that. What do you mean? What’s not for me?”
Her statement must have been a signal to Kellogg and Professor’s doppelganger. They started forward, pistols raised and gripped in both hands, bodies and arms positioned in a modified isosceles stance that Professor recognized immediately as the tactical shooting position he had learned in the Teams. For the first time since encountering the Changelings, it occurred to Professor that he might have misjudged their ability level. These men had been trained by experts. He could see it in every move they made.
Professor’s duplicate stopped a mere ten feet away, nearly point blank range. Kellogg continued forward, careful to stay out of arm’s reach, and circled alongside Professor. “Your weapon,” he said. “Where is it?”
It was plain that any show of resistance would be suicidal. Professor raised his hands a little higher. “Under my shirttail.”
Kellogg moved out of Professor’s line of sight and then came in close enough to pluck the weapon from its holster. “Is that the only one?”
“Unfortunately,” Professor replied. He felt a tap against his right ankle, then the left; Kellogg verifying that he did not have a backup weapon concealed there.
“Kneel,” Kellogg said. “Hands laced behind your head.”
Professor remained standing. “If you’re going to kill me, just get it over with.”
“I said—”
The woman cut him off. “It’s all right. Let him stand.” She tilted her head toward Professor. “Contrary to what you might thing, we do not shed blood with reckless abandon. And you may yet have some usefulness to us.”
“This should be good.”
She turned to Shah again. “Atash, are you armed?”
“No,” Shah said, and then echoed Professor. “Unfortunately.”
She reached out to him with an open hand. “Join me. I want to show you something.”
Shah glanced uncertainly at Professor. “Show me what?”
“What you came here to see. The Vault. You do want to see it, don’t you?”
“I…” He swallowed. “I don’t know. What’s in it?”
“Only the truth, Atash. Does that frighten you?” She smiled, which did not soften her arrogance in the slightest. “Gerald Roche was wrong. There was no conspiracy to alter the calendar. No fabrication of history to conceal this supposed ‘Phantom Time.’ That’s the truth you want to hear, isn’t it? You need not fear otherwise.”
“The Prophet?”
“Peace be upon him,” she said, sardonically. “Come with me and I will show you the truth about your Prophet.”
“I don’t understand. Is this another one of your tricks?”
“No tricks, Atash.” She stretched her hand toward him again. “This is for you.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Somehow, Jade managed to hold on to her flashlight, though it offered little in the way of illumination as she was swept along in the torrent. Caught in the whirlpool, she was spun around so violently that, despite the light in her hands, all she could see for several long seconds was complete unrelenting dark. Her lungs burned and her chest convulsed with the need to breathe, but she could feel water moving against her face and had no way of knowing if she was submerged or not. She squeezed her fist tight around the flashlight, and fought the compulsion to draw in a liquid inhalation until she couldn’t fight it anymore. Her mouth came open in a gasp that drew in neither water nor air but an aerosolized combination of the two. She gagged and coughed, all the while spinning around and around like a sock in the wash cycle.